1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to the field of e-commerce. Other aspects of the present invention relate to a method and system to intelligently manage an infrastructure that supports an e-service business.
2. General Background and Related Art
The expanding use of the World-Wide Web (WWW) for business continues to accelerate and virtual corporations are becoming more commonplace. Many new businesses, born in this Internet Age, do not employ traditional concepts of physical site location (bricks and mortar), on-hand inventories and direct customer contact. Many traditional businesses, who want to survive the Internet revolution are rapidly reorganizing (or re-inventing) themselves into web-centric enterprises. In today's high-speed Business-to-Business (B2B ) and Business-to-Customer (B2C) eBusiness environment, a corporation must provide high quality service, scale to accommodate exploding demand and be flexible enough to rapidly respond to market changes.
The growth of eBusiness is being driven by fundamental economic changes. Firms that harness the Internet as the backbone of their business are enjoying tremendous market share gains—mostly at the expense of the unenlightened that remain true to yesterday's business models. Whether it is rapid expansion into new markets, driving down cost structures, or beating competitors to market, there are fundamental advantages to eBusiness that cannot be replicated in the “brick and mortar” world.
This fundamental economic shift, driven by the tremendous opportunity to capture new markets and expand existing market share, is not without great risks. If a customer cannot buy goods and services quickly, cleanly, and confidently from one supplier, a simple search will divulge a host of other companies providing the same goods and services. Competition is always a click away.
eBusinesses are rapidly stretching their enterprises across the globe, connecting new products to new marketplaces and new ways of doing business. These emerging eMarketplaces fuse suppliers, partners and consumers as well as infrastructure and application outsourcers into a powerful but often intangible Virtual Enterprise. The infrastructure supporting the new breed of virtual corporations has become exponentially more complex—and, in ways unforeseen just a short while ago, unmanageable by even the most advanced of today's tools. The dynamic and shifting nature of complex business relationships and dependencies is not only particularly difficult to understand (and, hence manage) but even a partial outage among just a handful of dependencies can be catastrophic to an eBusiness' survival.
Businesses are racing to deploy Internet enabled services in order to gain competitive advantage and realize the many benefits of eBusiness. For an eBusiness, time-to-value is so critical that often these business services are brought on-line without the ability to manage or sustain the service. eBusinesses have been ravaged with catastrophe after catastrophe. Adequate technology, to effectively prevent these catastrophes, does not exist.
eBusiness infrastructures operate around the clock, around the globe, and constantly evolving. If a critical supplier in Asia cannot process an electronic order due to infrastructure problems, the entire supply chain may come to a grinding halt. Who understands the relationships between technology and business processes and between producer and supplier? Are they available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 a year? How long will it take to find the right person and rectify the problem? The promise of B2B, B2C and eCommerce in general will not be fully realized until technology is viewed in light of business process to solve these problems.
Web-enabled eBusiness processes effectively distill all computing resources down to a single customer-visible service (or eService). For example, a user interacts with a web site to make an on-line purchase. All of the back-end hardware and software components supporting this service are hidden, so the user's perception of the entire organization is based on this single point of interaction. How can organizations mitigate these risks and gain the benefits of well-managed eServices?
Never before has an organization been so dependent on a single point of service delivery—the eService. An organization's reputation and brand depend on the quality of eService delivery because, to the outside world, the eService is the organization. If service delivery is unreliable, the organization is perceived as unreliable. If the eService is slow or unresponsive, the company is perceived as being slow or unresponsive. If the Service is down, the organization might as well be out of business.
Further complicating matters, more and more corporations are outsourcing all or part of their web-based business portals. While reducing capital and personnel costs and increasing scalability and flexibility, this makes Application Service Providers (ASPs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) the custodians of a corporation's business. These “xSPs” face similar challenges—delivering quality service in a rapid, cost efficient manner with the added complication of doing so across a broad array of clients. Their ability to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is crucial to the eBusiness developing a respected, high quality electronic brand—the equivalent of prime storefront property in a traditional brick and mortar business.
The Internet enables companies to outsource those areas in which the company does not specialize. This collaboration strategy creates a loss of control over infrastructure and business processes between companies comprising the complete value chain. Partners, including suppliers and service providers must work in concert to provide a high quality service. But how does a company control infrastructure which it doesn't own and processes that transcend its' organizational boundaries? Even infrastructure outsourcers don't have mature tools or the capability to manage across organizational boundaries.
The underlying problem is not lack of resources, but the misguided attempt to apply yesterday's management technology to today's eService problem. As noted by Forrester Research, “Most companies use ‘systems’ management tools to solve pressing operational problems. None of these tools can directly map a system or service failure to business impact.” To compensate, they rely on slow, manual deployment by expensive and hard-to-find technical personnel to diagnose the impact of infrastructure failures on service delivery (or, conversely, to explain service failures in terms of events in the underlying infrastructure). The result is very long time-to-value and an unresponsive support infrastructure. In an extremely competitive marketplace, the resulting service degradation and excessive costs can be fatal.